Mixed-initiative multimedia for mobile devices: Design of a semantically-relevant low-latency system for news video recommendations

The increasing ubiquity of networked mobile computing devices such as cell phones and PDAs has created opportunities for the transmission and display of multimedia content. However, such mobile devices have inherent resource constraints: low network bandwidth, small screen size, limited input methods and low commitment viewing. Therefore, a mobile platform requires systems and applications for information display and access to mitigate these various constraints and further complicates their design. To facilitate access to news video on mobile devices, a coordinated design approach is taken, considering various system perspectives. The goal is to provide a cognitively palatable stream of videos and a seamless and low latency user experience through the use of an adaptive mixed- initiative interface to solicit user relevance feedback, and content retrieval integrated with client-side content aware prefetching. These various components are otherwise usually considered independently in the system design. The experiments suggest that this approach is helpful for recommending news video content on a mobile device, and areas for future investigation are outlined. The contributions of this paper are: (1) a mixed-initiative user interface design for small devices integrated with a content recommendation strategy that harnesses user relevance feedback; (2) coupled with the design and implementation of a content-aware prefetching scheme for videos, using the abovementioned feedback to lower the user perceived latency on the client-end; and (3) overall coordinated system design, with a quantitative evaluation of the tradeoffs between bandwidth, semantic relevance and user perceived latency.